Enter the "Turkey Scratch" Into Your Dixlexicon
Pt 1. Love and Beavish Or Use Beavish As Your Language of Love
In 2004, around about the time of Spring, my family had a visitor to our suburban yard, who insisted on doing some landscape gardening.
I left Brisbane in 2001 to work as a journalist in Griffith, NSW, and during that time my parents bought some bark and woodchips to use as mulch for the garden. The best place to put it was the front lawn, leaving enough space for the postie to get past. It was still there, when I returned to Brisbane in 2003, albeit in a somewhat smaller capacity.
Just before Spring, 2004, our visitor, a bush or scrub turkey commonly found in Australian backyards, took up residence on the mulch pile. He had a grand old time, scratching and scratching and scratching the bark into a reasonable heap as all male turkeys do before mating time. The idea is that the male turkey finds a suitable site for a nest, and then scratches bark and humus and all sorts of matter into a pile. When he finds a Lady Turkey that he likes and they discover they share mutual turkey interests and get together, perhaps for a coffee, perhaps a bit more, let's just see how it goes. At some stage they realise that this turkey of the opposite sex can fill a void in their life that only needs to be filled once a year, albeit in a purely physical fashion; and they do what all turkeys do when they meet like this, and mate. The lady turkey then lays an egg in the mound and the large amount of detritus incubates the egg until it is ready to hatch. In the tropical and sub-tropical rainforests from where the turkey originates, the mound is extremely important to protect and keep the egg at the proper temperature for hatching.
There was just one problem with our visitor. He had no mate. And because he had not met a mate, he just kept on scratching. Soon he had already used all our bark and decided to then go up the hill and scratch all the bark off the garden in the retaining wall, on to the footpath, and across the several metres of lawn to his nest. Then he went up our driveway to the garden that ran alongside it and scratched bark off there and back again down about 10 metres to his nest. Every day or so, my patient mother and sometimes our neighbour, a skilled gardener, would return all the bark to the garden. And they put down some wire to prevent our distraught turkey from making off with our garden mulch. Our neighbour herself had no problem with distraught male turkeys, as the ones round her way were regularly seen copulating with their female companions. But nevertheless, our turkey still found ways of scratching that bark back onto his mound.
Eventually, we bit the bullet, or rather my father did, and he carted all the bark from the front lawn up the hill to the backyard, a more convenient place for a nest from our point of view, but destroying in the process our poor turkey's painstakingly produced mound.
We still saw him scratching and generally poking around our yard, as manic as ever. Scratch, scratch, scratch. Poke, poke, scratch. He was so lonely and no Lady Turkey seemed to be interested in him. I knew how he felt. In fact, I sometimes wondered if I had jinxed him, considering my own bad luck with the lady folk, although my desires were not quite as carnal as his, or perhaps not quite basic as his. We humans have greater minds, you see, and our love and sexuality and morality are bound up in more string and tape than turkeys'.
I told my friends about this turkey and we decided that when someone is lonely and looking for love, they are, in fact, doing the "Turkey Scratch".
See next blog for more words from the Beavish Dixlexicon (the Language of Love).
In 2004, around about the time of Spring, my family had a visitor to our suburban yard, who insisted on doing some landscape gardening.
I left Brisbane in 2001 to work as a journalist in Griffith, NSW, and during that time my parents bought some bark and woodchips to use as mulch for the garden. The best place to put it was the front lawn, leaving enough space for the postie to get past. It was still there, when I returned to Brisbane in 2003, albeit in a somewhat smaller capacity.
Just before Spring, 2004, our visitor, a bush or scrub turkey commonly found in Australian backyards, took up residence on the mulch pile. He had a grand old time, scratching and scratching and scratching the bark into a reasonable heap as all male turkeys do before mating time. The idea is that the male turkey finds a suitable site for a nest, and then scratches bark and humus and all sorts of matter into a pile. When he finds a Lady Turkey that he likes and they discover they share mutual turkey interests and get together, perhaps for a coffee, perhaps a bit more, let's just see how it goes. At some stage they realise that this turkey of the opposite sex can fill a void in their life that only needs to be filled once a year, albeit in a purely physical fashion; and they do what all turkeys do when they meet like this, and mate. The lady turkey then lays an egg in the mound and the large amount of detritus incubates the egg until it is ready to hatch. In the tropical and sub-tropical rainforests from where the turkey originates, the mound is extremely important to protect and keep the egg at the proper temperature for hatching.
There was just one problem with our visitor. He had no mate. And because he had not met a mate, he just kept on scratching. Soon he had already used all our bark and decided to then go up the hill and scratch all the bark off the garden in the retaining wall, on to the footpath, and across the several metres of lawn to his nest. Then he went up our driveway to the garden that ran alongside it and scratched bark off there and back again down about 10 metres to his nest. Every day or so, my patient mother and sometimes our neighbour, a skilled gardener, would return all the bark to the garden. And they put down some wire to prevent our distraught turkey from making off with our garden mulch. Our neighbour herself had no problem with distraught male turkeys, as the ones round her way were regularly seen copulating with their female companions. But nevertheless, our turkey still found ways of scratching that bark back onto his mound.
Eventually, we bit the bullet, or rather my father did, and he carted all the bark from the front lawn up the hill to the backyard, a more convenient place for a nest from our point of view, but destroying in the process our poor turkey's painstakingly produced mound.
We still saw him scratching and generally poking around our yard, as manic as ever. Scratch, scratch, scratch. Poke, poke, scratch. He was so lonely and no Lady Turkey seemed to be interested in him. I knew how he felt. In fact, I sometimes wondered if I had jinxed him, considering my own bad luck with the lady folk, although my desires were not quite as carnal as his, or perhaps not quite basic as his. We humans have greater minds, you see, and our love and sexuality and morality are bound up in more string and tape than turkeys'.
I told my friends about this turkey and we decided that when someone is lonely and looking for love, they are, in fact, doing the "Turkey Scratch".
See next blog for more words from the Beavish Dixlexicon (the Language of Love).
posted by Lord Beavish at 8:32 pm
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